X requests it be reinstated in Brazil after complying with judge's orders, sources say

[September 27, 2024]  By GABRIELA SÁ PESSOA and BARBARA ORTUTAY

SAO PAULO (AP) — In the high-stakes showdown between the world’s richest man and a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, Elon Musk blinked.

Musk’s social media site X has complied with Alexandre de Moraes’ orders and requested its service be reestablished in the country, two sources said Thursday.

X complied with orders to block certain accounts from the platform, name an official legal representative in Brazil, and pay fines imposed for not complying with earlier court orders, his lawyers said in a petition filed Thursday, according to the sources, who are familiar with the document. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

On Saturday, de Moraes ordered the platform to submit additional documentation about its legal representative for court review, which the sources said has been done.

X was blocked on Aug. 30 in the highly online country of 213 million people, where it was one of X's biggest markets, with more than 20 million users. De Moraes ordered the shutdown after sparring with Musk for months over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation. The company said at the time that de Moraes' efforts to block certain accounts were illegal moves to censor “political opponents" and that it would not comply. Musk called the judge an enemy of free speech and a criminal. But de Moraes' decisions have been repeatedly upheld by his peers — including his nationwide block of X.

In a twist, X’s new representative is the same person who held the position before X shuttered its office in Brazil, according to the company’s public filing with the Sao Paulo commercial registry. That happened after de Moraes threatened to arrest the person, Rachel de Oliveira Villa Nova Conceição, if X did not comply with orders to block accounts.

In an apparent effort to avoid her getting blamed for potential violations of Brazilian law — and risk arrest — a clause has been written into the representation agreement that any action on the part of X that will result in obligations for her requires prior instruction in writing from the company, according to the company’s filing at the registry.

Associated Press emails and calls to her office were not returned. The Supreme Court’s press office has not confirmed receipt of X's documents, and X did not immediately respond to a request from the AP.

An encouraging sign, perhaps motivated by business sense

It’s still early to know whether the feud between X and Brazil’s top court is over, said Bruna Santos, a lawyer and global campaigns manager at nonprofit Digital Action. However, the platform's decision to appoint a representative indicates the company has entered “a state of good-faith cooperation with Brazilian authorities.”

And the fact that Brazilian users migrated in droves to rival platforms BlueSky and Threads may have played into X's backstep, Santos added.

“There must be a genuine concern on the platform that they are losing users, the core users from the early Twitter days, or the loyal ones, who stick around for good,” she said.

At a university in Rio de Janeiro, some students told the AP they were heartened by the news.

“I used it a lot as a way to search for information and news, and I missed it,” said João Maurício Almeida Raposo, a 19-year-old economics student. He started using Threads, but doesn’t like it.

Brazil is not the first country to ban X — far from it — but such a drastic step has generally been limited to authoritarian regimes. The platform and its former incarnation, Twitter, have been banned in Russia, China, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Venezuela and Turkmenistan, for instance. Other countries, such as Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt, have also temporarily suspended X before, usually to quell dissent and unrest.

A view of a laptop shows the Twitter sign-in page with their logo, in Belgrade, Serbia, Monday, July 24, 2023. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic, File)

X’s dustup with Brazil has some parallels to the company’s dealings with the Indian government three years ago, back when it was still called Twitter and before Musk purchased it for $44 billion. In 2021, India threatened to arrest employees of Twitter (as well as Meta’s Facebook and WhatsApp), for not complying with the government’s requests to take down posts related to farmers’ protests that rocked the country.

Speech is more limited in Brazil than in the US

Unlike in the U.S., where free speech is baked into the constitution, in Brazil speech is more limited, with restrictions on homophobia and racism, for example, and judges can order sites to remove content. Many of de Moraes’ decisions are sealed from the public and neither he nor X has disclosed the full list of accounts he has ordered blocked, but prominent supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro and far-right activists were among those that X earlier removed from the platform.

Some belonged to a network known in Brazil as “digital militias.” They were targeted by a yearslong investigation overseen by de Moraes, initially for allegedly spreading defamatory fake news and threats against Supreme Court justices, and then after Bolsonaro’s 2022 election loss for inciting demonstrations across the country that were seeking to overturn President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s victory.

In April, de Moraes included Musk as a target in an ongoing investigation over the dissemination of fake news and opened a separate investigation into the U.S. business executive for alleged obstruction.

In that decision, de Moraes noted that Musk began waging a public “disinformation campaign” regarding the top court’s actions, and that Musk continued the following day — most notably with comments that his social media company X would cease to comply with the court’s orders to block certain accounts.

Musk, meanwhile, accused de Moraes of suppressing free speech and violating Brazil’s constitution, and noted on X that users could seek to bypass any shutdown of the social media platform by using VPNs. In an unusual move for a democratic country, de Moraes also set exorbitant daily fines for anyone using virtual private networks, or VPNs, to access the platform.

X’s defiant stance appears to have softened following the shutdown.

On Sept. 18, after X became accessible to some users in Brazil despite the ban, the Government Affairs account posted that this was due to a change in network providers and was “inadvertent and temporary.” But, it added, “we continue efforts to work with the Brazilian government to return very soon for the people of Brazil.”

The score is 1-0, but the game isn’t necessarily over, said Carlos Affonso Souza, a lawyer and director of the Institute for Technology and Society, a Rio-based think tank.

“The first round ends with a victory for de Moraes, who adopted drastic measures, but which wound up producing the effect of making X do a reversal and comply with orders,” Affonso Souza said.
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Ortutay reported from San Francisco.

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